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Wednesday, April 17, 2019

This article originally appeared on VICE US.
Last week, fans of cool astronomical phenomena (read: almost everyone) rejoiced as an international team of scientists released the
first ever image of a black hole, continues VICE.

Photo: VICE

For the astrophysicists, software
engineers, philosophers, and mathematicians who worked on the Event
Horizon Telescope that captured the image, the announcement was an
unprecedented milestone.

Their excitement was perhaps best
embodied by a photo of one computer scientist on the Event Horizon
Telescope team, Katie Bouman, who hid her beaming smile with her hands
as she looked at the monumental rendering. Bouman had a lot to smile
about—the image was created usingpetabytes of data that were stitched together using CHIRP, an algorithm that Bouman
worked on. And Bouman had long served as a public face for the computer
imaging aspect of the Event Horizon Telescope, delivering a TED Talk on the project in 2016.

But within a day of the announcement, online harassers created fake
Instagram accounts for Bouman, started angry threads on Reddit and
Hacker News asserting that she hadn’t done as much to help the project
as she was getting credit for, and produced lengthy YouTube tirades, all
with the aim of discrediting her contributions to the project...

In scientific fields that thrive on data, sexism can pass as legitimate
when couched in the language of cold, unfeeling numbers and percentage
points. But anyone with even a basic understanding of modern computer
science should quickly realize how dangerous and plainly wrong these
trolls are when they weaponize metadata from public Github repositories. Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.